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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   38206 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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This one should be relatively easy to solve. What percentage of the institutionalized was black?

...

BAME stands for "black and middle eastern"

It actually stands for "Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic" - i.e. it is the British equivalent of POC, a term for lumping all non-white groups together. As of 2021, the British government discourages its use because the various non-white ethnic groups do not in fact like being lumped together.

Anecdotally, Jamaicans and Somalis are the black subgroups that commit most of the crime. I always think the best argument against HBD as the main explanation for crime rates is the difference between Jamaica (45 murders per 100,000) and Barbados (14), which carries over to Jamaicans and Bajans in the UK.

...

Per the national censuses, which use local race groupings that don't include a US-style one-drop rule, both Jamaica and Barbados are 92% black, with most of the rest being mixed. This is the typical pattern for the Caribbean (including Haiti), with a majority black population who look something like Usain Bolt, with a small mixed-race elite who look like Rhianna. Looking at the pictures in the Barbados and Bridgetown wikipedia articles confirmed this.

The Caribbean-American community is mostly drawn from this mixed-race elite (because US immigration is selective) - think Eric Holder or Colin Powell. But the Bajans who stayed in Barbados or who moved to the UK before or shortly after independence (when UK immigration for Commonwealth citizens was not selective) are blacker.

...

A) The rule that homicides are a good metric for general crime because they are unlikely to be swept under the rug may only apply to Western countries. How many intrepid journalists are looking to expose underreporting in third world countries, and would anyone care?

B) Nonetheless, levels are probably substantially lower as blacks aren't necessarily gonna be soft on black criminals in a black majority country. There may be collective punishment mechanisms in play.

If the American slave population was adversely selected in the first place -- African tribes selling their own convicts, misfits and conquered people to Western slavers -- then HBD provides an explanation why the group descended from them continues to underperform.

HBD posits a partial reversion to the mean one generation after the selection event occurs. After that, there should be no further effect; the non-heritable components of the initial selection (including both shared and non-shared environmental components and test error from the selection event) will have washed out with the next generation, while the heritable component will remain forever.

Reversion to the mean is a thing regardless of HBD. What it says is that if you select on a characteristic that is partly heritable, the next generation of the selected population will be closer to the mean of the parent population than the selected population itself is. But it happens only once and it doesn't bring you all the way back.

If that's the case (and I haven't seen any evidence that African tribes were predisposed to selling convicts and misfits to slavers; I don't see what conquered people has to do with anything given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor), then we should expect other places with similar concentrations of undesirables to be similar. I'm unaware of any evidence that suggests that the crime rate in Australia is higher than that in England, and the former was specifically founded as a penal colony.

I don't see what conquered people has to do with anything given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor

It suggests, on average, that the conquered people are less fit than the conquerors.

given that losing a war doesn't suggest one is more predisposed to violence than the victor

Both World Wars are by mainstream historians thought to have been started by the side which would go on to lose. With starting a war commonly considered a sign of bellicosity and proneness to violence, one has some pretty big anecdotal evidence against the quoted line.

Except we aren't talking about the two World Wars. We're talking about some unknown tribal wars and we have no idea whether the prisoners are of the tribe that actually started them. And if bellicosity is considered a sign of inclination to violence, given the number of colonial wars Europeans have started (including the United States), I wouldn't cite that as strong evidence for blacks being particularly predisposed to violence.

Might there be some lingering selection bias in the new world cohort?

What do you think was selected for or against?

Expendability / Saleability

Angered the chief / king.

Lost the conflict with your neighbors, etc.

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